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Crowdstrike a Billion Dollar Unicorns

How many billion dollar unicorns do you know. Crowdstrike is a client and we are thrilled for their success. The continued rapid growth of CyberSecurity has driven the growth of Crowdstrike Falcon and all of its toolkit. We are proud to be involved with this amazing company and its very rapid success, and its effectiveness in immediately having an impact on numerous major incidents our world has had. To great success, and more importantly success in stopping threats.

Irvine, California-based CrowdStrike was founded in 2011 by Gregg Marston, George Kurtz, and Dmitri Alperovitch. The three set up the company with the mission of building the ability to manage cyberhacks that were not being addressed through existing malware-based defenses. They wanted to build a solution that would combine advanced endpoint protection with expert intelligence to pinpoint the adversaries perpetrating the attacks, not just the malware.

The idea to set up CrowdStrike came to George Kurtz when he was on a plane and saw his neighboring passenger wait for nearly fifteen minutes before McAfee was done scanning his laptop for viruses. He thought as the CTO of McAfee that was an eye-opening experience for him. He got together with Dmitri, vice president of threat research at McAfee, and decided to build a better, faster solution on the cloud.

Before setting up CrowdStrike, George and Dmitri conducted an extensive market study by visiting large organizations globally to understand their security challenges. They conducted detailed investigations into accounts of customers who had been hacked and realized that while organizations had spent millions on the best security products, they were still susceptible to and suffering from severe breaches. Most security solutions available then relied on stopping malware and were not focused on building technology that would be able to stop the attacks from happening. To address this, they focused their attention on saving the endpoint. They built a new security architecture that delivered entirely in the cloud and collected and analyzed endpoint data to prevent attacks.

CrowdStrike is privately funded and does not disclose its financials. It does reveal that it has endpoint deployments in 176 countries and processes 40 billion security events each day. Earlier reports had pegged the company’s revenues at $27.3 million in 2015 with a growth rate north of 2,400%. More recent estimates suggest that the company is running at more than $100 million annual run rate for the current year.